Autumn Cakes at Petit Decorer

It's been a while since I went to Petit Decorer, the tiny patisserie at the end of my street, and as I have to pass the window and smile at the girl behind the counter every night on my way home from work, I was starting to feel guilty. Also, I'd noticed that there were a number of new cakes that I hadn't had a chance to try yet, so I could no longer excuse my failure to support my local pastry chef by reasoning that I'd already bought everything they sell at least once. I was tempted to go with my old favorite, the Mont Blanc, or the Tiramisu Roll Cake, both of which Petit Decorer does very well, but in the interests of keeping it interesting, I compromised on the new-for-fall Kuri Roll Cake instead. Like the Mont Blanc, it's a combination of whipped cream, white cake, and chestnut cream, with chunks of candied chestnuts inside the roll and an irresistibly glittery cut-out chocolate chestnut on top. I also got the chocolate millefeuille, which is just like the vanilla version except that it contains chocolate custard inside and has a snazzy diagonally-dribbled topping of melted chocolate, which strikes me as vaguely Halloween-appropriate. There's something about fall that triggers sweets-consumption - the cooler weather, the trick-or-treating associations, the harvest season bounty. These cakes fit the bill.

Petit Decorer

Minami-azabu 1-4-21

http://decorer.jp

Ikura-Maguro-Don Lunch at Matsuba Sushi

Ikura, or salmon roe, is one of my favorite Japanese foods. It's also one of my favorite Russian foods, and one of the few Russian words I have no problem remembering or pronouncing, since it's basically the same as in Japanese: ikra. Russians spread it on toast, because it is, after all, caviar - though the eggs are much bigger, and thus differently textured, than ordinary caviar. Japanese mostly eat it on rice, either on sushi or in a rice bowl, or donburi. I love the bright red-orange color of ikura and the way each egg bursts saltily on the tongue, and I think the best rice-bowl combo is the parent-and-child oyakodon of silky-smooth salmon sashimi and bouncy ikura. But when I had lunch at Matsuba Sushi the other day and saw that the daily special was a maguro (tuna) and ikura don, I didn't even have to look at the rest of the menu.
Like many other Japanese restaurants, Matsuba Sushi offers lunch specials consisting of the main dish plus a few extras included in the price. Here, it's miso soup and a chawanmushi. Literally "steamed tea cup," chawanmushi is an egg custard with assorted goodies, usually shrimp or vegetables, buried inside. This one was very simple, containing just a ginko nut and a shrimp, plus the mitsuba leaves on top. The miso soup was also plain, with just a bit of wakame seaweed floating in the cloudy broth. But with a big rice bowl covered with tuna, ikura, and a few slices of pickled daikon radish and ginger, I didn't really need anything fancy on the side.

Matsuba Sushi

Minato-ku, Roppongi 1-6-1

Izumi Garden Tower, 2F

3-3568-6653

TGI Friday's, Roppongi

TGI Friday's was never on my list of must-go restaurants, either in the US or in Tokyo, but when a friend half-jokingly suggested it, I was on board right away. It's always fun to see how American culture gets reinterpreted by and for the Japanese, and Friday's didn't disappoint. From the waiters in cowboy bandannas to the overstuffed red vinyl booth benches, the atmosphere was about as stereotypically American as you can get. The water came in huge, ice-filled glasses, a striped straw sticking up the middle. The menu offered a perplexingly boundless choice of heart-unhealthy fare. But Americans know that when faced with options, someone's got to be the decider, and that someone is us.
So decide we did, first on a shared appetizer of fried macaroni and cheese. I don't know if this reflects badly on my patriotism, but I had never heard of this particular poison, despite the fact that it would have fit in seamlessly on the Southern menus and cafeteria lines of my Alabama childhood. Don't ask me how mac and cheese can be turned into fried cubes - but apparently it can. They were greasily delicious.
Just because this was TGI Friday's doesn't mean everything on the menu was as American as fried mac and cheese, though. As soon as I saw that they had mentaiko spaghetti, I knew what I was having for lunch. The creamy sauce of spicy pink fish-roe, the big pile of shredded nori and daikon radish sprouts, and the long strands of pasta are a killer combination that I only wish was available on the Friday's menu back home. As the placemat says: The Taste of Texas. The Passion of Mexico. Just where mentaiko spaghetti fits into that ethos I'm not sure, but I definitely enjoyed it.

TGI Friday's

Roppongi 3-12-6

3-5412-7555

and other locations across Japan

Organic House

Last week I wrote about getting a 250 cc cup of soup for 610 yen, which I considered something of a scam. I'm not sure why but 610 yen doesn't seem all that much at other restaurants I frequent for lunch - most have a set lunch menu that runs an average of 900 yen, and while it does include more than soup, it's still kind of a lot considering what you get. Yet for some reason I never feel ripped off. I think it's just something about soup...
By weight, I guess Organic House is just as bad a scam as Soup Stock Tokyo - or worse, considering that 218 g is a bit less than 250 cc (at least I think it is). But at Organic House you can get a whole variety of salads, cold and hot dishes, and even soups from the buffet line, and it's all organic, too! It's easy to pile up your plate and come in well above 218 g, of course, which hikes up the price. Both photos below cost me a little more than the one at the top.
Though everything I've tried on the Organic House buffet has been pretty good, they don't change the options very often, making it a little boring to eat there every day. The spinach with ground sesame seeds, a common Japanese dish that's jarringly sweet, is good, as are the pickles and the fried fish with eggplants and grated radish. The salmon, below, is from the hot line, and is a bit dry and sweet. While most of the dishes are at least vaguely Japanese, they do have a few Italianesque offerings, such as the boiled egg and cherry tomato salad with a green mayonnaise sauce reminiscent of pesto and the pumpkin sprinkled with almonds, raisins, and a mysterious white drizzle that might well be mayo again.
The takeaway boxes are available in a variety of sizes. This is the mid-size option, but there's a smaller box as well as a large, circular one. You can buy rice (white or white mixed with brown) on the side, as well as your choice of soup (miso, meat, or pumpkin). In addition to takeaway, there are also artily curved plastic plates you can use to eat in the cafe. It seems like a popular place, and though it only opened a few months ago it looks like it might hold out for a long tenure in this location.

Organic House

Akasaka 1-12-32

Ark Mori Bldg. 1F

3-3583-3931

and other locations around Tokyo

Fruity Vegan Coffee Cake

I'm moving in 25 days, so the race is on to eat up everything in my cupboards before I go. When I left Nashville, I remember Yuri and I did our best to finish two half-finished half-gallons of ice cream, sitting on the wall to wall carpet in the furniture-less room, using plastic spoons. Fortunately I have much less food left over this time around, but what I do have is jars and jars of different flavors of honey and jam, as well as some baking staples and a monster bag of raisins.
What I'll do with the raisins I have yet to figure out, but most of my flour, white sugar, and olive oil were conveniently dispatched by this vegan coffee cake. As I used water and the liquid from the preserves rather than the soy milk specified in the original recipe, it turned out more pastry than cakelike, something like a superthick fruit cobbler. Not that that's really a problem. It's extremely moist, rich, and sweet, and even cut into small squares each piece is quite filling. The flavor of the olive oil is subtle, but it's definitely there, giving the cake a little exotic je ne sais quois. Any flavor of preserves, jam, or fresh or dried fruit would probably do just as well, but dates or the figs I use probably go especially well with the olive oil. I'd try making it again to use up some of those raisins... but I've sold my cake pan and oven.
Recipe:

2.5 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp salt

2/3 cup olive oil

2/3 cup syrup from fruit preserves

1/2 cup water

2 tsp vinegar (or lemon juice)

2 tsp vanilla

1 jar fruit preserves (approx. 2 cups)

2-3 tablespoons brown sugar, for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 180C/350 F. Line a baking dish with foil. The smaller the dish, the taller your cake will turn out. I used a 9 x 9 square dish, and the batter rose in the oven to fill it perfectly.

Sift dry ingredients together in a large bowl, mixing well. In another bowl or measuring cup, stir together liquid ingredients. Add liquid to dry and stir to make a thick batter. Pour half the batter into the prepared dish. Spoon the fruit preserves evenly over the batter. Pour the remaining batter on top of the fruit and sprinkle with the brown sugar. Bake for 80-100 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. You may need to tent with foil to prevent the top becoming too brown.

Soup Stock Tokyo

Tokyo is reputed to be one of the most expensive cities in the world. I don't usually notice that it is, apart from the appalling exchange rate (about 82 yen to the dollar) and the occasional melon worth its weight in gold. Fruit boutiques, though, seem to belong to that planet also occupied by Louis Vuitton and Porche, where stratospheric prices are justified by the product's status and craftsmanship. Could a humble cup of soup ever aspire to be part of that world?
Well, I'm not saying 610 yen for 250 milliliters of vegetable soup is quite in the same category as a thousand-dollar wallet... but if I thought I could get away with a soup cafe that charged that kind of price in the US, I'd be opening one tomorrow. Soup Stock Tokyo serves nothing but soup, rice, bread, and Japanese-style curry, and the cheapest item on the menu is this "R" for regular sized cup of soup, on its own. Add bread or rice to make a lunch set, and the price goes up to 760 yen. You can also choose two soups in an even smaller size, plus rice, to make a 900 yen set. Considering that soup, rice, and bread are some of the cheapest things to make (soup kitchens, anyone?) this seems like highway robbery. Yet the shop is always crowded and today, an admittedly soup-friendly cold and rainy one, there was a line out the door.
One reason for its popularity might be that it's a healthy alternative for people who eat out every day; each type of soup has its calorie content clearly posted and none of them is terribly high. The paper cups actually have a mark on the inside showing the level to which they're to be filled, so you know you aren't exceeding the small serving size. There's a variety of soup flavors, as shown on the website, and the selection changes daily so even if you ate here every day you wouldn't get bored. I chose the vegetarian minestrone, and it was served with a few fresh basil leaves sprinkled on top. The soup was full of chunky pieces of bell pepper and onion, and had a smooth texture that might have come from some kind of added carbohydrate, though there were none of the usual minestrone suspects of noodles or whole beans. With a piece of my homemade bread, it was a light but tasty lunch - though I still don't think the price is justified.
Soup Stock Tokyo

Locations around the Tokyo area

No-Knead Bread

I know that I'm way behind to be blogging about no-knead bread in the fall of 2010. The phenomenon peaked a few years back, and I was there, making no-knead bread along with every single other reader of Mark Bittman's article in the New York Times. I didn't have a blog then, and to tell the truth I wasn't that thrilled with the result. The rustically misshapen loaf didn't taste so different from the other breads I made, and as I've always enjoyed kneading, there seemed to be no good reason to give it up. However, here in Tokyo I don't have a good place to knead, so when I received a package of Kawakami Farm's home-grown wheat flour, I decided to give no-knead bread a second chance.

No-knead bread is a simple recipe and a simple preparation, as you'd expect from a column by The Minimalist. The original recipe calls for 3 cups of flour and 1 5/8 cups water, a teaspoon of salt, and a quarter teaspoon of instant yeast, which are all stirred together and left to ferment for 18 hours. I didn't follow the recipe exactly, but tried to stick with the ratio of flour to water. I accidentally added sugar, thinking it was salt, so my bread had a teaspoon of both. And as I wasn't sure whether my yeast was instant or not, I put in about half a teaspoon instead of a quarter. The photo above shows what it looked like once I'd stirred it all up: a wet, loose batter. I let it sit at room temperature until I went to bed, about three hours later, at which point it looked like this:
Clearly, the yeast was working. I started to worry that it would rise too quickly and maybe even overflow the bowl if I left it out all night. I've often let dough rise in the fridge so I felt more comfortable doing that than following the instructions meant for dough made with half the amount of yeast I'd used (sugar also makes yeast work harder). Into the fridge it went. The next morning, it had big bubbles and was thicker:
When I stirred it, it clung to the sides of the bowl with tenacious strands of gluten. This is what normally happens through kneading, but according to the no-knead theory, 18 hours of rising will accomplish the same thing.
After stirring it down, I divided the dough in half, to bake part today and let the rest stay in the fridge another day or so to develop more gluten and flavor. It was very sticky and difficult to separate, and the bit of flour I sprinkled on my hands to cut down on the gooeyness didn't do a bit of good. But I managed to get it into separate bowls. The green one went back into the refrigerator; the pink one stayed out at room temperature to await its date with the oven.

Two hours later, it had risen all the way up to the rim of the bowl:

To bake, Mark Bittman advises preheating both your oven and your cast-iron casserole at 450 F. My little convection oven only goes up to 220 C, and I'm not sure that's hot enough. In any case, I put my cast iron pot inside and cooked it for ten minutes, then took it out, sloshed some olive oil around in the bottom, and plopped in the dough. It didn't make a nice sizzling sound, so maybe the pot wasn't hot enough - but in any case, I covered it, baked for ten minutes, uncovered it, and baked for another 30 minutes. It did develop a rustic crack and a nice golden crust...
...but the loaf remained disappointingly flat.

Still, there were plenty of air bubbles inside, and the texture was chewy and moist, not at all like the dense hockey-puck loaves I used to make when I first started baking as a teenager. The nutty taste of the wheat was delicious, and perfectly complemented by a thin smear of butter and my homemade grape jelly. I'm curious to try baking the second half of the dough in a few days - I wonder if it will rise any higher, or if this high-liquid no-knead dough in my convection oven is always going to be on the short side?